Abstract:

In the present study, we analyze the results of a series of surveys in order to assess the experience, expectations, and perception about the use of gamification strategies in Engineering degrees. Three group of interest have been considered: students, professors, and potential developers of gamification tools.

Regarding Engineering students, we detected an important lack of participation during lectures of subjects with theoretical contents, since, in general they prefer practical applications and exercises. Therefore, we have developed a project about the use of gamification to increase the motivation in these kind of courses. The games that we carried out were mainly quizzes and short problems solved in groups, that were awarded if they correctly solved them within a given period of time. Some results of the development of the games were reported in [1]. However, several interesting questions also arose from this preliminar experience. Specifically, during the implementation of the games, we found that there are two factors that can play an important role in the success of the activities: the available time to solve the quizzes and the monitoring of the professor. Additionally, the participation of the students in the design of the games was found of interest. Together with the aforementioned factors regarding the implementation of games, the general perception of professors and potential developers of gamification tools was also considered as a key point for the improvement of gamification activities. Thus, we decided to carry out a series of surveys about these three aspects.

We collected results from around 60 professors of two departments of both Telecommunication Engineering and Computer Science, 130 students who had experienced gamification in the last academic year, and 20 potential developers.

The main conclusions we derived from the answers of these surveys are the following:
a) Most of professors (around 60%) have never applied gamification, although the majority (more than 80%) believes it can improve the students’ motivation. This may be due to the fact that only around 30% of professors are familiar with gamification strategies and tools. The same perception is extracted from the potential developers, most of whom have never worked with them but recognize its positive value. Likewise, more than 80% of students believe gamification can enhance the learning experience.
b) Regarding the aforementioned three factors in the implementation of the games, we found that there are opposing opinions about the importance of the time spent to solve a part of the game. Whereas professors agree that it is important to take into account the time, developers and students do not consider time as a key factor to be evaluated. The three groups agree that the participation of students in the design of the games is beneficial and that the supervision of the professor during the execution of the games is of fundamental importance.

References:
[1] C. Alcaraz, E. Abdo-Sánchez, R. Halir, J. Toutouh, M. Ruiz and D.H. Stolfi, 'Gamification to Fight Lack of Motivation and Heterogeneity in Engineering', EDULEARN 2017, Barcelona, Spain.

Keywords:

Gamification, Motivation, Engineering.